valve

Shoutout to YouTuber CrowbCat for the solid compilation video here, even though it's kind of seriously depressing.

SteamDB has reportedly found a treasure trove of games coming to Steam, including Half Life 3. It's been a while since anyone has had an excuse to use a "Half Life 3 confirmed" meme, so now seems as good a time as any.

The leak comes from a minor change Valve made to Steam that revealed a bunch of package info:

Valve recently implemented functionality to automate some frequently asked Steam support questions such as permanently hiding a game from your Steam account and these package names being exposed are a result of them not hiding them when they added this. A similar issue occurred with app names as well.

The full list of games that may or may not be coming soon to Steam includes not only HL3, but Bad Rats Show. Check it out:

• Half-Life 3
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
• Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
• Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster
• Final Fantasy VI
• Bad Rats Show
• Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-
• Little King’s Story
• STEINS;GATE
• Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
• Sonic Boom
• Earth Defense Force 4.1
• Criminal Girls
• Stranger of Sword City

Believe if you want to, but it seems unlikely that Valve would be this careless. Third party developers are apparently able to name their packages whatever they want, so someone may have just been making a joke. 

The PC master race can finally join those console plebs on the couch!

ORANGE BOX not quite as awesome in Germany

It's still gonna be a better loved shooter than Call of Duty.

Seriously, Valve, you're beginning to make Steam look more and more like Origin every day.

Valve rolled out its pay-for-mods service on Thursday to universal ire from the PC gaming community. In theory, the system is less dubious, if it weren't for the fact that Valve will pocket a massive percentage of the mod charge, leaving the actual modders with precious little profit to their name.

Let's say a modder makes a Skyrim mod that they want to charge $4.99 for. Setting aside the fact that DLC microtransactions are already a plague on the gaming industry, the maker of said Skyrim will only ever get $1.25 for their efforts, while the remaining $3.74 goes straight to Valve for doing no work whatsoever.

This system also introduces an endless quagmire of problems for modders who use elements of other people's mods to make their own. Case in point: the Skyrim fishing mod made by Chesko. As it turns out, Chesko used elements of an idle character animations mod made by Fore. So, that means that Fore is entitled to a percentage of the profits from Chesko's mod on top of Valve's already egregious 75% cut, right? If so, what percentage does Fore get?

As you can see, the whole system quickly becomes a mess, seriously curtailing the resources of modders like Chesko, and infringing on the intellectual property rights of Fore. No matter what happens though, Valve wins and we lose. Such a sleazy cash grab is uncharacteristic of our lord Gaben, but some say it was bound to happen eventually. As Harvey Dent once said, "something something die a hero, something something the villain."